Read Summary of '''[[Devotion/Bhakti Summary|Devotion/Bhakti]]'''
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=Why is Bhakti Important?=
==The Power of Bhakti==
It is rather the fact that in my writings on Yoga I have given Bhakti the highest place. ... the deeper the emotion, the more intense the Bhakti, the greater is the force for realisation and transformation. It is oftenest through intensity of emotion that the psychic being awakes and there is an opening of the inner doors to the Divine.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/bhakti-devotion-worship#p31</ref>
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You are no doubt right about asking for the bhakti, for I suppose it is the master-claim of your nature: for that matter, it is the strongest motive force that sadhana can have and the best means for all else that has to come. It is why I said that it is through the heart that spiritual experience must come to you.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/bhakti-devotion-worship#p14</ref>
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''Q. Sweet Mother, can one realise the Divine through love alone?''
''A:'' Oh! yes, my child, certainly.
It is even the most direct way. One can realise the Divine, that is to say, identify oneself with the Divine, become fully conscious of the Divine and be an instrument of the Divine. But naturally, one does not realise the integral yoga, for it is only along one line. But from the point of view of identification with the Divine it is even the most direct path. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/20-june-1956#p26</ref>
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In the integrality and absoluteness of bhakti and surrender, we find the essential condition of perfect peace leading to uninterrupted bliss.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/surrender#p11</ref>
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This love that is knowledge, this love that can be the deep heart of your action, will be your most effective force for an utter consecration and complete perfection.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/19/the-message-of-the-gita#p34</ref>
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If one has bhakti and aspires in the heart’s silence, if there is the true love for the Divine, then the nature will open of itself, there will be the true experience and the Mother’s power working within you, and the necessary knowledge will come.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/combining-work-meditation-and-bhakti#p44</ref>
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The desire for the Divine or bhakti for the Divine is the one desire which can free one from all the others—at the core it is not a desire, but an aspiration, a soul need, the breath of existence of the inmost being, and as such it cannot be counted among desires.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/desire#p21</ref>
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Whatever difficulties still remain, be sure that they will be surmounted. There is no need for the outer being to be nervous—the Mother’s Force and the devotion within you will be sufficient to overcome all that stands in the way.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/difficulties-and-the-mothers-force#p29</ref>
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''Q. All in me is proceeding towards the Mother’s love, devotion and purity. Why then am I not going up in my consciousness and getting higher experience?''
''A:'' The power of experience is not gone—but what is most important now is to develop the psychic condition of surrender, devotion, love and cheerful confidence in the Mother, an unshaken faith and a constant inner closeness, and also to bring down from above the peace, wideness, purity etc. of the higher Self which is that of the Mother’s consciousness. It is these things that are the basis of the siddhi in this Yoga—other experiences are only a help, not the basis. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/broad-lines-of-the-sadhana#p2</ref>
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But there is the more intimate Yoga which from the first consists in this love and attains only by the intensity of its longing without other process or method. All the rest comes, but it comes out of this, as leaf and flower out of the seed; other things are not the means of developing and fulfilling love, but the radiations of love already growing in the soul. This is the way that the soul follows when, while occupied perhaps with the normal human life, it has heard the flute of the Godhead behind the near screen of secret woodlands and no longer possesses itself, can have no satisfaction or rest till it has pursued and seized and possessed the divine fluteplayer. This is in essence the power of love itself in the heart and soul turning from earthly objects to the spiritual source of all beauty and delight. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-way-of-devotion#p6</ref>
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For love is the one emotion in us which can be entirely motiveless and self-existent; love need have no other motive than love. For all our emotions arise either from the seeking after delight and the possession of it, or from the baffling of the search, or from the failure of the delight we have possessed or had thought to grasp; but love is that by which we can enter directly into possession of the self-existent delight of the divine Being. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-motives-of-devotion#p11</ref>
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'Q. 'People make all sorts of effort to have God’s darshan; some even weep and weep, yet they fail to obtain it. We in the Asram don’t seem to have done very much, and yet we are here with you. What has brought this about?''
''A:'' There are many things that have brought it about—a connection in past lives with the Mother and myself, the development of your nature in former births which made it possible for you to seek the Divine, bhakti in those lives bearing its fruit now—finally, the Divine Grace. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/connections-in-past-lives#p8</ref>
==Love is the Crown of all Being==
Love is the crown of works and the crown of knowledge.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/19/the-message-of-the-gita#p33</ref>
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Love is the crown of all being and its way of fulfilment, that by which it rises to all intensity and all fullness and the ecstasy of utter self-finding. For if the Being is in its very nature consciousness and by consciousness we become one with it, therefore by perfect knowledge of it fulfilled in identity, yet is delight the nature of consciousness and of the acme of delight love is the key and the secret. And if will is the power of conscious being by which it fulfils itself and by union in will we become one with the Being in its characteristic infinite power, yet all the works of that power start from delight, live in the delight, have delight for their aim and end; love of the Being in itself and in all of itself that its power of consciousness manifests, is the way to the perfect wideness of the Ananda. Love is the power and passion of the divine self-delight and without love we may get the rapt peace of its infinity, the absorbed silence of the Ananda, but not its absolute depth of richness and fullness. Love leads us from the suffering of division into the bliss of perfect union, but without losing that joy of the act of union which is the soul’s greatest discovery and for which the life of the cosmos is a long preparation. Therefore to approach God by love is to prepare oneself for the greatest possible spiritual fulfilment.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p5</ref>
==Alchemy of Pain and Suffering==
So too in all happenings we have to come to see the dealings with us of the divine Lover and take such pleasure in them that even grief and suffering and physical pain become his gifts and turn to delight and disappear finally into delight, slain by the sense of the divine contact, because the touch of his hands is the alchemist of a miraculous transformation. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-mystery-of-love#p5</ref>
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Some reject life because it is tainted with grief and pain, but to the God-lover grief and pain become means of meeting with him, imprints of his pressure and finally cease as soon as our union with his nature becomes too complete for these masks of the universal delight at all to conceal it. They change into the Ananda.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-mystery-of-love#p5</ref>
==Role of Bhakti in Integral Yoga==
This Yoga [Integral Yoga] too is not a Yoga of knowledge alone—knowledge is one of its means, but its base being self-offering, surrender, bhakti, it is based on the heart and nothing can be eventually done without this base.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/combining-work-meditation-and-bhakti#p43</ref>
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The realisation of the Supreme, the Ishwara, is certainly the essential thing; but to approach him with love and devotion and bhakti, to serve him with one’s works and to know him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience, is also essential in the path of the integral Yoga.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/35/this-worldliness-and-other-worldliness#p1</ref>
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...but bhakti is the very soul and heart and summit of this richer, completer, more intimate union. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/19/the-supreme-word-of-the-gita#p10</ref>
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This Yoga of love will give you a highest potential force for spiritual largeness and unity and freedom. But it must be a love which is one with God-knowledge. ... But when the God lover is also the God-knower, the lover becomes one self with the Beloved; for he is the chosen of the Most High and the elect of the Spirit. Develop in yourself this God-engrossed love; the heart spiritualised and lifted beyond the limitations of its lower nature will reveal to you most intimately the secrets of God’s immeasurable being, bring into you the whole touch and influx and glory of his divine Power and open to you the mysteries of an eternal rapture. It is perfect love that is the key to a perfect knowledge. This integral God-love demands too an integral work for the sake of the Divine in yourself and in all creatures. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/19/the-message-of-the-gita#p33</ref>
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Thus only can we aspire through the offering of all our nature and being to a living union with the One who has become in Time and Space all that is. Here is the place of bhakti in the scheme of the Yoga of an integral self- liberation. It is an adoration and aspiration towards that which is greater than imperishable self or changing Nature. All knowledge then becomes an adoration and aspiration, but all works too become an adoration and aspiration. Works of nature and freedom of soul are unified in this adoration and become one self-uplifting to the one Godhead.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/19/the-secret-of-secrets#p8</ref>
===Limitations of Thought and Knowledge===
The pride of the philosopher looking down on the passion of the devotee arises, as does all pride, from a certain deficiency of his nature; for the intellect too exclusively developed misses what the heart has to offer. The intellect is not in every way superior to the heart; if it opens more readily doors at which the heart is apt to fumble in vain, it is, itself, apt to miss truths which to the heart are very near and easy to hold. And if when the way of thought deepens into spiritual experience, it arrives readily at the etherial heights, pinnacles, skiey widenesses, it cannot without the aid of the heart fathom the intense and rich abysses and oceanic depths of the divine being and the divine Ananda. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p7</ref>
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If knowledge is the widest power of the consciousness and its function is to free and illumine, yet love is the deepest and most intense and its privilege is to be the key to the most profound and secret recesses of the Divine Mystery. Man, because he is a mental being, is prone to give the highest importance to the thinking mind and its reason and will and to its way of approach and effectuation of Truth and, even, he is inclined to hold that there is no other. The heart with its emotions and incalculable movements is to the eye of his intellect an obscure, uncertain and often a perilous and misleading power which needs to be kept in control by the reason and the mental will and intelligence. And yet there is in the heart or behind it a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call intuition,—for that, though not of the mind, yet descends through the mind,—has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer to the Divine than the human intellect in its pride of knowledge. According to the ancient teaching the seat of the immanent Divine, the hidden Purusha, is in the mystic heart,—the secret heart-cave, ''hṛdaye guhāyām'', as the Upanishads put it,—and, according to the experience of many Yogins, it is from its depths that there comes the voice or the breath of the inner oracle. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-i#p16</ref>
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Love too as well as knowledge brings us to a highest oneness and it gives to that oneness its greatest possible depth and intensity. It is true that love returns gladly upon a difference in oneness, by which the oneness itself becomes richer and sweeter. But here we may say that the heart is wiser than the thought, at least than that thought which fixes upon opposite ideas of the Divine and concentrates on one to the exclusion of the other which seems its contrary, but is really its complement and a means of its greatest fulfilment. This is the weakness of
the mind that it limits itself by its thoughts, its positive and negative ideas, the aspects of the Divine Reality that it sees, and tends too much to pit one against the other. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p8</ref>
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And it is true that philosophy by itself without the rapture of spiritual experience is something as dry as it is clear and cannot give all the satisfaction we seek, that its spiritual experience even, when it has not left its supports of thought and shot up beyond the mind, lives too much in an abstract delight and that what it reaches, is not indeed the void it seems to the passion of the heart, but still has the limitations of the peaks. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p10</ref>
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It [thought in the mind] finds a greater truth in the delight of the One in itself, a lesser truth or even a falsehood in the delight of the One in the Many and of the Many in the One, a greater truth in the impersonal and the Nirguna, a lesser truth or a falsehood in the personal and the Saguna. But the Divine is beyond our oppositions of ideas, beyond the logical contradictions we make between his aspects. He is not, we have seen, bound and restricted by exclusive unity; his oneness realises itself in infinite variation and to the joy of that love has the completest key, without therefore missing the joy of the unity. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p9</ref>
=How to Walk on the Path of Bhakti Yoga?=